Social Ecology: From Theory to Practice

Dan Chodorkoff — Sunday and Monday 11:00 – 1:00

This afternoon workshop will begin with an overview of key philosophical, political, and strategic issues that surface in the theory and practice of social ecology. Social ecology advocates a reconstructive and transformative outlook on social and environmental issues, and promotes a directly democratic, confederal politics. As a body of ideas, social ecology envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward a world that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom.

Building Dual Power

Chaia Heller — Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 2:00 – 4:00

This class explores what direct democracy looks like when practiced within movements as well as how a revolutionary movement could lead us to create a directly democratic society. Central to our discussion will be questions of movement building, dual power, and organizations that speak to both general freedoms as well as the particular forms of oppression and liberation within movements and a free society.

Direct Democracy and the Revolutionary Tradition

Peter Staudenmaier — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday 4:30 – 6:30

Many radical movements at various points in history and in different parts of the world have created and implemented visions of direct democracy, a grassroots and participatory approach to constructing a genuinely democratic society. These models of direct democracy often differ sharply from standard assumptions about ‘democracy’ built around elections and the state. We will explore the rich legacy of direct democracy and its role in revolutionary situations from a range of perspectives, engaging with challenging questions about politics and economics, the culture of radical movements and the impact of decision-making procedures, and the difficult relationship between the strategic choices we face today and the world we envision for tomorrow.

Building Strategic Mass Movements

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 11:00 – 1:00

We find our selves in a truly rare moment in history. If seized strategically, we have the potential to build a movement capable of transforming our political, economic and social realities. How can we build movement structures that allow for broad based participation and active strategic engagement from the ground up. How can we build movements capable of integrating direct action, education, reform work, and alternative building in a way that moves us self-consciously and explicitly towards revolutionary change.

Solidarity, Accountability, and the Political Strategy of Care

The occupy movement has given us the “99%” frame, encouraging participation from a diversity of people en masse. The truth is that though we are all negatively impacted by the current economic system, we are not impacted equally. This course will explore the useful and often misunderstood concepts of solidarity, accountability, and self-interest. Through popular education, participants will engage organizing frameworks to align with frontline communities, develop their own relationship to this political moment, and articulate what the “long haul” means as it relates to collective practices and structures of care.

What Is the ISE?

For more than thirty years, the Institute for Social Ecology has been offering educational programs on radical social and ecological transformation. The ISE views the penetration of systems of domination and homogenization of culture as impediments to human freedom and as the root causes of the ecological crisis. It is the ISE’s core belief that humans have the potential to foster vibrant, self-governing communities free from hierarchy, social inequity, and ecological degradation.

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The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:

"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions ofparticipatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.

This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework forcrafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less

Our first online course Ecology, Democracy, Utopia was a great success! In response to high demand we are now offering a self-directed course featuring the same video lectures, readings, and discussion forums but without the fixed time commitment of a weekly seminar. This allows for more flexible pa...

"Bookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In "Ecology of Freedom" (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In "The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship" (1987) and "Urbanisation without Cities" (1992), he proposed "libertarian municipalism" as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel "The Dispossessed" in part on Bookchin’s early work)..." ... See MoreSee Less